Saturday, July 13, 2013

Here comes the sun

by digby

I know you don't have enough to worry about so I thought I'd share this:

Today, electric utilities and the insurance industry are grappling with a scary possibility. A solar storm on the scale of that in 1859 would wreak havoc on power grids, pipelines and satellites. In the worst case, it could leave 20 million to 40 million people in the Northeast without power — possibly for years — as utilities struggled to replace thousands of fried transformers stretching from Washington to Boston. Chaos and riots might ensue.

That’s not a lurid sci-fi fantasy. It’s a sober new assessment by Lloyd’s of London, the world’s oldest insurance market. The report notes that even a much smaller solar-induced geomagnetic storm in 1989 left 6 million people in Quebec without power for nine hours.
“We’re much more dependent on electricity now than we were in 1859,” explains Neil Smith, an emerging-risks researcher at Lloyd’s and co-author of the report. “The same event today could have a huge financial impact” — which the insurer pegs at up to $2.6 trillion for an especially severe storm. (To put that in context, Hurricane Sandy caused about $68 billion in damage.)

The possibility of apocalypse has piqued scientific interest in solar storms for many years. But researchers are now realizing that periodic space weather can cause all sorts of lesser mischief all the time, such as disorienting GPS satellites or severing contact between polar flights and air-traffic control.

This is the sort of thing that makes you want to throw up your hands and say "I give up."